So, yeah, I've heard all the drama about this game, and yep, it was WAY over-hyped and over-priced, with minimal features and poor performance, and blatant false advertising. It's good to see the gaming community FINALLY doing something about the crap that gaming companies have been giving them lately, rather than bending over and taking a big EA dong right up the Origin for as long as they have been. I doubt we'll see much significant change out of this, unfortunately. Same over-hyping, on-release DLC, withholding content to sell separately, buggy releases, game-breaking updates, ridiculous refund time limits.... I could go on all day.
Anyway... No Man's Sky has been updated. There's a new base-building feature that I haven't gotten very far into yet, but it looks like you'll be able to hire aliens from space stations to work at your base to mine, farm, and research. Though they seem desperate for a job, you don't have to pay them anything.... welcome to Trump Tower X3 Also you can teleport to your home base from any space station. You can also build save points, or a signal booster anywhere to help you find manufacturing plants, base sites, resource deposits, and drop pods.
The resource mechanics have been changed. Carbon no longer charges everything. You need either power cells, which now require plutonium to make, or thaumium for your life support, you can still charge your mining laser with carbon, and you can now recharge your hazard protection with shielding shards or zinc, and you charge your pulse engine with... iron?! Sentinels no longer give you titanium but instead give you some unique material I haven't seen a use for yet, and destroyed ships always drop "tropheum". The best thing about the resource tweaks though, is that you can actually scan planets from space, and it shows you what materials you can find there, so you don't have to waste time searching each and every planet for that one thing you're missing anymore. One big problem I seem to be having with this, though is that apparently COPPER SEEMS TO BE THE MOST RARE MATERIAL IN THE FUCKING UNIVERSE!!! DX
Those big freighters you see floating in space are now much more interesting. You can now dock with them and talk to the captain, and buy the freighter from him. I haven't tried this yet. It's super expensive, but the inside of the freighter looks fucking awesome, though there's a significant performance drop when I'm inside one. It looks like eventually you'll be able to build a base inside the freighter. Pirates will still occasionally attack them, but the freighter will now defend itself with the turrets, and if you wipe out the pirates, you can then talk to the captain and he'll give you some free antimatter and warp cells, which is great because it's also more difficult to find the thaumium you need to make a warp cell than in the previous version of the game.
Performance has been increased slightly. It's still crap for me on medium settings, but on low it seems to run just fine, with a noticeable drop inside the freighters. That annoying achievement pop-up is still a thing. A little worse now actually, because there are new achievements for increasing your relationship with the three alien species, and you still can't enter your ship until it goes away.
So yeah the game has been significantly improved, but I'd still advise against buying it until they fix some bugs, add more features, and drop that $60 price tag. I'm having tons of fun with it though, and if you do buy it, I'd say get it from GoG. That way you can back-up those updates, and go back to a previous version if they end up breaking the game again later.
